


To Will One Thing—

by riverlight



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-30
Updated: 2006-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-26 17:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverlight/pseuds/riverlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth, in the run-up to deployment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Will One Thing—

At first they're not even people, just names she's never heard of, names on the endless lists that show up on her desk at the SGC with resumes and bios and FBI files attached. There's a staff, somewhere, people who've been charged with recruitment and candidate selection, and they provide her with everything she could ever want to know about these people: their subfields and specialties, the awards they've won, the doctorates they've earned; their parents' names, their kids' names, the names of their pets. She's amazed at the detail: she knows where they like to shop, what kind of car they drive, where they went to summer camp. She knows, as far as can be written down on paper, their dreams, their psychoses, their traumas.

But gradually they become people to her: this one, quirky and red-haired and apparently charming, likes rock-climbing; that one, dour, has never gotten over the double blow of his wife leaving and another man winning the Rutherford Medal, all in the same year. They become people to her, and because she has final hiring authority, she gets to set their names down on her list of people who she wants to take to another galaxy. McKay, R., Canada; Dimwitty, W., England; Zelenka, R., Czechoslovakia; Ragnarsdottir, L., Iceland. She writes up her list, again and again, shuffling names up and down the limited number of slots, and of course she has ten, fifty, a hundred other things to be doing, but she thinks about it when she's on hold with yet another military rations supplier, or when she's flying between the base and McMurdo, and in the end she gives her list to General O'Neill a full week before he'd wanted it, satisfied that this is it, these are her people.

There are other lists, too, of course; she's taken to carrying a notebook everywhere, so she can write down additions when she thinks of them. She tries to keep things organized—Things to ask Rodney separate from Supplies Currently at McMurdo separate from the one called simply Food—but there's so damn much that five minutes after her morning ritual of reorganizing the lists she's got things all jumbled up again, and "RM re: thermal energy" is right next to "survival training??" and "reschedule drs. appt.," and eventually she gives up.

It's not as if she has to handle everything personally, which is a relief—she's got a BA in Political Science, an MA in Communication, and a PhD in Political Economy; what does she know about logistics and training for a long-term military mission? She'll say one thing for the SGC—there's not a day goes by that doesn't thank God for the people she works with. They've got doctors and linguists and experts in xenobiology and a hundred other people whose positions she doesn't have a clue about, but God, she's grateful to them. First thing she learned in all of this was that sometimes delegation really is the best option, and by the time they're six months out, she's mostly stopped making lists of things to do and started making lists of people to check in with.

And really, six months is nothing, no time at all—before she's even remotely ready, it's two weeks out, then one, then a matter of days, and the organized chaos of pre-mission planning ramps up a notch to a maelstrom of barely-contained panic and last-minute tasks. And then they're one day out, and she's checking the cargo manifolds one last time and calling roll, and it all feels like a dream. She's got to be dreaming this, they can't possibly be about to go through a stargate to another planet, another galaxy, this can't possibly be happening—but then reality snaps back and she's standing in the control room with O'Neill, listening to Grodin run through the pre-gate checklist.

They're all gathered there, waiting, faces turned towards the gate, tense or excited or terrified or expectant or all four. She knows every one of them, now, Sumner and Sheppard and Ford and Carlson and every other person down there; they're not just names on a list any more. For a moment she's terrified, God, she can't possibly do this—but O'Neill smiles, and his eyes are warm, so she shoulders her bag and walks down to join her people. "Dr. Weir, you have a go," O'Neill says, and she walks through the gate with the team behind her, making a list in her head of the things she's going to have to do to keep them safe.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a challenge, sometime in the last, oh, five or six years. I didn't like it enough, at the time, to post it to my journal, as I recall; I recognized even then it wasn't my greatest story. But. I'm a completist, and want all my fic in one place, so here it is. Take it with a grain of salt. :)


End file.
